[gentoo-user] Re: How to stem the flood of new packages?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2013-02-11, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote:
> On 11/02/2013 23:55, Grant Edwards wrote:
>> <whinge>
>> I tried doing an "emerge -auvND world" today.  It's been three days
>> since the previous update, and today portage wants to update 1 package
>> and install _35_new_ones_.
>>
>> Seriously?  35 new packages that I have to install on Monday that I
>> didn't have to have the previous Friday?  A few of them are virtual
>> packages, but the vast majority are actual package that I neither want
>> nor need (other than to satisfy a requirement imposed by a new USE
>> flag that defaults to "on" when it should have defaulted to "off").
>>
>> I realize that every developer thinks think their pariticular package
>> is the greatest thing ever and should be installed on everything since
>> the TI SR-54 calculator, but this seems a bit silly...
>> </whinge>
>
> I know you put in the <whinge> tags, but I'll take it as obvious you are
> also asking a real question :-)

Well, sort of. 

> What new stuff did you get?

As best I can remember: a handful of bluetooth stuff, openldap,
consolekit, policykit, thunar, wxwidgets, libnotify, fam, a bunch of
gst plugins, and another dozen or two things pulled in by those.

> Did you change your profile to 13.0 and now have a ton of USE flags set
> on that were previously off?

It didn't occur to me until afterwards, but yes, the "new" USE flags
did correspond with the change to a 13.0 desktop profile.  I'm now
wondering if my 10.0 profile was the non-desktop "generic" one.  When
I saw all the "new" USE flags, my assumption was that the USE flags
had just been added -- but now I'm betting they were newly enabled by
the 13.0 profile.

> I've been noticing a trend over the last two years or so where devs
> take a big packages and break it up into several smaller ones that
> are easier to manage, sort of like monolithic X to modular X on a
> smaller scale. This is a good thing overall.

Yes, that's a good thing (I think we all remember when it happened in
a big way to X a while back).  This didn't _seem_ to be that.  I'm
pretty sure things like thunar, openldap, bluetooth stuff, and various
others have been separate packages all along.

I think the switch to the 13.0 profile was probably the underlying
cause.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! Oh, I get it!!
                                  at               "The BEACH goes on", huh,
                              gmail.com            SONNY??